Coming to terms with COVID-19 squeamishness
While staying safe by wearing a mask or face shield, sacrificing the top layers of skin to soap and water, opening the mailbox with the bottom of my T-shirt and veering away from people whose faces aren’t covered, I have become almost obsessed with my hatred of images that run in newspapers and on TV showing us what the novel coronavirus looks like.
It clearly causes a complicated disease, COVID-19, because there are increasingly more repulsive graphics that accompany stories related to it.
My aversion is inexplicable, even to myself, although not as inexplicable as people who don’t wear masks around other people. I have a strong stomach. I can eat while people talk about gross things. I witnessed horrifying and traumatic scenes when I was a police reporter and have lived through enough personal turbulence not to be rattled by the small stuff.
Yet I am so disgusted by these COVID virus images that I have sought help — by asking friends how these images affect them. I have expected at least one person to grab my arm, virtually, of course, and cry, “Girl? You, too?!”
Instead, their responses have been tepid, but helpful, as if they don’t want me to feel all alone in my little crazytown, so they say things like, “Yeah, they are kind of icky.” But I can tell by the way they say it that they have a whole category of icky, the grade of which these images wouldn’t make.
I would see a therapist, but virtual-meeting platforms can’t seem to sync mouth motion with audio, so until they get that right, my best option is self-diagnosis: COVID-specific squeamishness. My rationale is that I am reacting in horror to images of a horror that is otherwise invisible.
The earliest image, as I remember, looks like a Styrofoam ball pierced with little red decorative darts. Kind of reminiscent of a Christmas ornament, but, yuck.
Then came the yellow blob covered in what looks like suction cups. My first thought was of a sinister Teletubbies dog toy.
Then a thing came along that resembles a flattened slab of burned eggplant, and it almost made me gag.
Next, we had little blue beads, like scrubbing bubbles dancing around a thing that looks like a giant walnut.
And now, I’ve just seen another one. Oh, God. This one looks like undersea coral, yellow and red, but the red things also look like strawberry gummy worms dusted in sugar.
I love undersea coral and even gummy worms, occasionally, but this image makes me look away, too.
I don’t need to hear from readers who think this is silly because, of course, it’s silly. It’s ridiculous.
Right now, there is everything else in the world to be troubled by more than pictures of what a deadly virus may look like. I would, however, like to hear from readers who may be experiencing revulsion at seeing them.
To get something productive out of my revulsion, I sought explanations of what the variations in these images mean — from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provide newspapers with those images.
I got through to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whose media person said she was trying to find someone who could talk to me about them. But when I didn’t hear back, I figured the person was doing more important things than talking to me.
The NIH website includes an image I hadn’t seen: This one made me think of protrusions of neon green moss dotted with bright purple dots that look like grape candy.
The caption reads, “Colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (green) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (purple), isolated from a patient sample. Image at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland.”
On the websites for all three of these entities, there are clues to make reasonable assumptions that the red dots in the Christmas decoration image may depict the virus and the ball may depict a cell, and what we are seeing is microscopic, writ large, or computer generated.
An editor I work with explained the decisions behind the alternative uses of the images in the paper. Editors change out the images to make sure readers don’t have to look at the same one repeatedly.
Like wardrobe decisions, if you wore the blue shirt on Monday, you don’t wear it again Tuesday. Except now, with most people working from home, no one cares if you wear the blue shirt every day.
People who create COVID19 virus images have almost covered the color spectrum. At some point, there’s bound to be an image that’s orange. It’s the only color left.